GFI Case Study: Montclair Board of Education

Written by: GFI Software

Montclair Public School District, is recognized by the United States Department of Education as one of the six best magnet school districts in the country with a group of schools falling under this umbrella name that accept students ranging from ages 5–16. Over 2,000 employees using email extensively and with recent legislation on electronic documentation and email archiving now affecting educational institutions in the United States, Montclair needed an effective email archiving solution that was easy to administer and allowed them to meet compliance regulations.

Challenges
The Montclair Public School District offers 7 elementary and 3 middle schools and manages to retain an impressive record of educational and administrational standards, therefore when the new legislation involving the requirement to archive all emails by educational institutions was introduced, Montclair saw fit to implement a software solution that would satisfy legal regulations and that was easy to deploy and administer. Nowadays schools are more dependent on communication technologies for their day-to-day activities and email is commonly used to communicate with students, members of staff, parents, to distribute minutes of meetings, and so on. Failure to comply with these regulations and be able to provide any requested documentation could result in fines, court sanctions and loss of credibility – something that Montclair was not about to risk. With such a high staff count, the volume of email traffic is high and the school needed to be able to retain of a copy of all official email in a logical and searchable manner for compliance purposes.

Implementation
“Montclair did some research to find the most appropriate product for them and decided upon GFI MailArchiver as their archiving software because of its competitive pricing, a successful trial software and good tech support during evaluation”, explained Alan Benezra from Montclair. “We also took a look at Symantec Enterprise Vault but found GFI MailArchiver to be more suitable for our needs”.

“The level of support that GFI offered was important for us and that was definitely a huge plus for us,” said Mr. Benezra. “Good documentation and tech support made this an easy install and configuration task. The fact that the product integrates seamlessly with existing systems was also important.”

Benefits
One of the major concerns for administrators when installing new software is the possible impact it may have on server performance as well as compatibility issues. This, however, was not an issue for Montclair.

“The software was very simple to install and no network performance hit as far as we can tell. It was installed and just started working, so we are very pleased with the immediate results and benefits that this product has offered,” said Benezra.

“Moreover users are now aware that company email is not personal and that a copy of every email is being archived. At the same time, employees know that they can delete emails yet still have a copy in the archive,” he added.

Target reached
The implementation of GFI MailArchiver has ensured that Montclair is now operating in accordance with legal regulations and that it can abide by any legal requirements that may be asked of them related to email documentation. Benezra stated that the choice of GFI MailArchiver was based on the fact that it had a good price point, the trial software worked successfully and they received very good technical support during the product’s evaluation. “The product simply works and archives!”

For more information about GFI MailArchiver visit: http://www.gfi.com/mailarchiver/.